The Mediated Murder of Filiberto Ojeda Rios
Today I received an essay by the distinguished independentistas Juan Mari Bras, arguing for independence. While the essay made interesting points, providing a chronicle of Puerto Rico's colonial history, what perhaps most struck me was not its key arguments but its suggestive allusions. Mari Bras noted that because Filiberto Ojeda Rios was not killed instantly, he was allowed to bleed to death--tortured as it were. This immediately suggests the alternative scenarios: what if the FBI had taken Filiberto to a hospital to recuperate so that he could have been formally and legally prosecuted, as they should have done? Here we enter the interesting realm of the 'what if' of history, which sheds more light into the motivation of its actors than a mere retelling of the events that would typically be done in history books.
Imagine, if you will, what would have happened otherwise.
It is clear that had Ojeda Rios been taken to the hospital, this might have led to two broad scenarios. The first is that, had he died, Ojeda Rios would have become a Puerto Rican martyr in a very real sense. Being carried to the hospital and treated there would have given his final hours (or days) a very public appearance with the pervasiveness of our modern media. All televisions stations would have covered the incident given its 'high profile nature' (and hence economic value). Before the camera's eyes--and the entire Puerto Rican population living both in Puerto Rico and the United States--Ojeda Rios would have died. The greater the suffering the greater the (negative) awareness of the FBI's abuse of force on the "Grito de Lares day". Worse yet, broadcast internationally via the BBC, alJazira, or the Associated Press, these images would have led to a public relations disaster, stimulating arguments for a withdrawal from Iraq and a reduction of aggression to Iran. We need not note that this would have been very counterproductive from the existing administration's point of view. Had Ojeda Rios lived and stood the tortuous trial under the US Patriot Act, this also would have shed a very large spotlight on the irony of 'bringing democracy to Iraq" in light of US own colonial relation. It also would have "cost" the US government money to treat, prosecute, and jail--a political 'no no' from a 'no taxes' government that is splurging war dollars as if there were no tomorrow .
This very brief consideration of these scenarios shed a great deal of light on actual FBI's behavior that night and its relationship to the police and the media. In what was a rather surprising move, nobody from the island was allowed to enter the 'scene of the crime' that night, despite the fact that gunfire had stopped for several hours. And when I write 'nobody', I mean nobody, including local police, press, or even the governor had he wanted to. This was particularly surprising given that, after all, it was only one man involved against a small army of officers that were not even from the local FBI squadron. It is clear that the Washington offices of the FBI did not want 'material evidence', which would have constituted material witnesses to the fact that the FBI did not act to save a life, in effect murdering Ojeda Rios. As in our imaginary scenario, to have captured images of Ojeda Rios during his final hours would have been to martyrize him. And that is something that the FBI desperately sought to prevent.
It also explains the nature of its excessive aggression to the local media, as when (due to a faulty perimeter line), numerous journalists were given the pepper spray treatment rather than being asked to move beyond the designated line. In the war of the minds, video and pictures of actions become more effective weapons than any gun or bomb. (In our modern society, political perception counts much more than physical aggression.)
However, given the extreme nature of the Filiberto Ojera Rios death, much more was said by the absence of information than its presence.